Where the heck are the Reward Updates?

bluewolf
bluewolf Posts: 5,821 Chairperson of the Boards
in MPQ General Discussion
Hey!  Remember back in November - a more innocent time, before Shardpocalypse - when shards were introduced?  Part of the official announcement on R 191 - almost 4 versions ago - was:

"Past that, we will be updating several other places in the game to include Shards. Places like Event Rewards, S.H.I.E.L.D. Clearance Levels, Champion Rewards, and more will be seeing these additional ways to gain characters getting updates. We’re still finalizing a lot of these various rewards and we’ll be sharing that information with you as it comes on line."

So what's up?  It's been 2 months now.  Will we see these promised updates at some point, or were they canceled?
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Comments

  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    Due to the unintended and unplanned Shardmas forced upon them, I think that might have delayed the implementation of those rewards so as to "balance" their intended plan.
  • JHawkInc
    JHawkInc Posts: 2,605 Chairperson of the Boards
    HoundofShadow said:
    Due to the unintended and unplanned Shardmas forced upon them, I think that might have delayed the implementation of those rewards so as to "balance" their intended plan.
    I don't want to be too pessimistic, but that was my first hunch as well. Figuring out where to tinker and dial back to balance out the shards they gave us that they clearly didn't want to.

    Of course, my other thought on this topic is that 2-day subs ought to be updated to give out the equivalent of 2 1-day subs, and that Season rewards in PVP haven't been touched... since CP was added? And those are well overdo updating even without shards. So I guess maybe I do want to be a little pessimistic.
  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    HoundofShadow said:
    Due to unplanned Shardmas forced upon them
    Hilarious! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😄😅😆😄😅😆
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    You left out "the unintended and".

    The dev mentioned before that they have to balance the game resource economy. That's why they have to make adjustments to champion rewards to make way for shards.

    The dev's initial plan was to give 1 5* cover and X shards that would give players up to another cover. Secondary 4* shards were not in the plan. Due to this "miscommunication", history was made and they were forced to give Shardmas.

    This Shardmas obviously derailed their initial plan. So, in order to return things to a state of balance, they have to postpone the updates until the time is right.

    After Shardmas, communication seems to have worsen due to another "incident".

    All the above, are of course, my opinion.  B) 

  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited January 2020
    Umm, market puffery != Reality.

    We have already gotten the champ rewards updates and everything was explicitly subject to change.  So by the letter of IceIX's statement, they have already made good.  Plus, they are focused on experimenting with direct monetization of shards (c.f., the Okoye offer up right now).

    I imagine that Hound is actually more or less right, and they are recalibrating their plans for any other rewards updates in light of the champion system experience.

    In any event, I would not hold my breath as the playerbase has (to my great frustration and despite my obviously brilliant warnings and analysis) mostly accepted demi's "shards are better than older rewards and adding them will cause a reduction in other resources" paradigm.  I expect any event rewards updates will be offset by some other, semi-hidden clawback.
  • crackninja
    crackninja Posts: 444 Mover and Shaker
    So the speculation is they "gave in" and gave out extra shards in November, and so to balance that out they are now giving out fewer shards for an undisclosed amount of time? I just hear "the only winning move is not to play" on a loop.

    Anyways, since they seem more interested in feedback these days, this is the only thing I care about.  Every day I hear nothing, my interest wanes.
  • wymtime
    wymtime Posts: 3,759 Chairperson of the Boards
    I am more interested in seeing when they will update the feeders for 4* to 5* for the new release characters.  We have Carnage, BRB, and Mr Sinister with no feeders and they just recently updated these.
  • jp1
    jp1 Posts: 1,081 Chairperson of the Boards
    So...just withholding out of spite is the consensus then? Or are we pretending there is an imaginary warehouse somewhere empty of “resources” due to the unexpected and unintended one time act of generosity they were “forced to” show? 

    Someone got some hurt feelings about their plan not being accepted as generously as they had hoped and we are paying the price as they look to milk every dollar of those “free gifts”

    Meanwhile, under the new system it takes me three times longer to cover new 4*s as they drop. So, yay for progress I guess. 

  • Warbringa
    Warbringa Posts: 1,299 Chairperson of the Boards
    Was thinking about this topic myself today and thinking about posting a similar post as the OP.
  • Codex
    Codex Posts: 304 Mover and Shaker
    bluewolf said:
    Hey!  Remember back in November - a more innocent time, before Shardpocalypse - when shards were introduced?  Part of the official announcement on R 191 - almost 4 versions ago - was:

    "Past that, we will be updating several other places in the game to include Shards. Places like Event Rewards, S.H.I.E.L.D. Clearance Levels, Champion Rewards, and more will be seeing these additional ways to gain characters getting updates. We’re still finalizing a lot of these various rewards and we’ll be sharing that information with you as it comes on line."

    So what's up?  It's been 2 months now.  Will we see these promised updates at some point, or were they canceled?
    They are working on valve time. So an update in two months would be an anomaly 
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited January 2020
    The "last minute" update was kinda sneaky. Regardless, the Shardmas was not part of their plan. It upsets the balance of the game as a whole.

    To the players, it's merely some virtual goods with arbitrary numbers. However, part of those numbers are made up of licensing costs, royalties, operating expenses, salaries of the dev etc. 

    I strongly believe it delayed the rollout of shards part 2. Come to think of it, the following might explain why Okoye HfH bundle and vault are cheap.


    My theory is that in order to roll out shards part 2 more quickly, they need to hit certain HP spending in order to speed up the implementation.They have KPIs to meet and it's a fact. HP is also their main source of income.

    Okoye is an easy sell and she is definitely versatile with majority of the characters. She made her vault and bundle an easier sell and any veterans who find those two Okoye (non-cash) packages average or below average will probably never be satisfied with whatever they offer anyway. That aside, since it is such an easy sell, they might be able to hit their goal faster. It might sound weird but if you work in an organisation where you have KPIs to meet, it might be easier for you to relate to this.

    Anyway, I don't think they need to "feel" the market with Okoye vault and HfH because it's too cheap. You can walk in with your eyes closed and you won't regret buying her vault or HfH deal.
  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited January 2020
    Hound, I would be shocked if their up license terms had any costs associated with the distribution of covers or other digital goods.  Maybe bonuses for high mtx revenues, but shardmas had no direct license/ip implications.
  • DyingLegend
    DyingLegend Posts: 1,208 Chairperson of the Boards
    They can't make money off of those updates
  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    I think it is indirectly related. Characters exist only because the dev bought the licensing rights for them. That alone is a cost to the company. In MPQ, those characters get converted into covers, and they are assigned a certain range of HP value because HP is the main source of income for them. Each (batch of) character have a certain ROI attached to them.

    In the first year or two, the VP of Demiurge was interviewed and he actually revealed the ins and outs of MPQ monetisation. If I didn't remember wrongly, the outflow of resources are more or less fixed and largely tied to amount of playtime, based on whatever formula they have. 

    The conversion from licensing cost to part of the game probably look like this now:

    Licensing cost -> covers -> shards -> HP -> playtime

    The influx of shards and covers thanks to Shardmas means that, indirectly, a large amount of HP was injected into the game to the players, not by choice, but by force. By force, I meant they were reviewbombed into giving the players additional rewards within a short period of time.

    Again, all the above are my opinions.


  • Vhailorx
    Vhailorx Posts: 6,085 Chairperson of the Boards
    You think demi (or d3) pays Marvel an additional sum for each new character introduced in the game?  Huh, I don't see an obvious reason that marvel would impose that structure on the IP licensing deal.  This isn't like a movie or other derivative where each character (or team) can stand alone, and could therefore be sold of separately.  It's Marvel Puzzle Quest, not [X-Men or Spider-Man] puzzle quest.  Parsing out the universe of characters that way wouldn't make sense to me. 

    Additionally, how would this scheme account for duplicates of the same character?  Marvel would be dumb to sell all characters at the same price (wolvie and Spidey are worth way more than sentry or north star).  But if the character cost is differential, then why are there so many **** dupes in the game (that would be very expensive)?

    In any event, sure, there is an indirect relationship between distributing rewards and costs, but it's a game with mtx, so that is true of almost literally everything related to the gsme, for both players and devs.  I don't know why that should be particularly relevant to this discussion, rather than just a general frame around all discussions of MPQ.
  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 5,821 Chairperson of the Boards
    There are a lot of assumptions/unknowns about the delay.

    You can construct a scenario where they didn't plan on Shardmas and the value of rewards, which in their valuation necessitated a delay in other reward updates to "balance out" the rate of rewards over time.  I'm sure that they have some kind of formula/budget guiding how they handle things.  (Not that they have touched rewards in over 2 years.)

    One issue I have - while Shardmas helped the vets a good amount, there are lots and lots of players (the vast, vast majority) who didn't get a massive windfall.  So the rewards were concentrated in the hands of the few top players which IMO should mitigate the "cost" of Shardmas.  There are thousands and thousands of players whose spending potential/need was impacted not one bit by Shardmas.

    Another issue with "Shardmas necessitates pushing back new rewards" is that it assumes that the reward update will be a net positive, and not some kind of tradeoff where we get some shards and lose some CP and HP.  I am not sure how likely that really is.  If it's a flat reward change - where players get the same level of rewards (in their valuations) that we get now - then this idea has less validity.  There's not much point in delaying an update that changes what you get but basically doesn't make you progress any faster.  I suppose this could be a reason to be hopeful for the (eventual?  maybe?) reward update.

    It could also be that they are hashing out the proper reward level to actually implement, realizing that if it doesn't feel good enough people might have a negative reaction.  In which case I suppose we need to be patient.

    Whatever the reasons it's not a good look.  Some communication would be nice.


  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited January 2020
    Based on what I read in interviews and discussions among game developers dealing with Marvel, it seems that besides licensing cost, they also pay royalties in the form of a % of their earnings to Marvel or they have KPI from Marvel to meet as well. How it is stated in legal documents depends on how their lawyers negotiate. As for licensing characters, developers can do batch character licensing or individual character licensing from Marvel.

    I'm not saying the above applies to MPQ. You have to decide whether what those developers said is true or not. To me, it looks reasonable enough to be plausible.

    As for communication, they have dialed back even more after that saga.

    If the players want more communication, I think they need to control how they react to those announcements from devs.  No one wants to communicate with people who reacts aggressively and sarcastically. It's natural human instincts. 

  • purplemur
    purplemur Posts: 454 Mover and Shaker
    KPI , ROI are not complete thoughts. It is not even as helpful as saying Carpenters have tools. If your going to talk about tools, you can’t just say hammer or screwdriver either. Ball-peen/$400 roofing titanium head? Talk about bits for the driver: you have shape- now lets talk gauge.
    so saying the devs look at sales to determine success is pretty tinykitty basic and pointless to always be dragging into any discussion of devs motivation.
    saying they need to make money to pay off their costs is about as banal as saying cheese is made from milk and cows are milked at a Dairy. You could even tell me how many gallons of milk a cow will yield per day, but that is not germane when discussing transportation costs or vaccination schedules.
    Applying the traditional sales and advertising formulae has not and will not work for digital goods/content delivery. MPQ is not a simple widget factory outta Muncy dealing with a walkout on the production line. Framing an opinion behind some MBA buzz words doesn’t hide the vacuous conjecture that riddles this idea that the devs were abused into stagnation. The expense of those shards were so great that they had to choose between the HMO premiums or the shards and the office is warmed with only the heat of the servrs, why oh why did the players have to be so cruel!!! Once they sell another 12k Logans looneys then they can start work. Why, if the players didn’t force foreclosure surely devs would have updated Support Circuit, I mean DPd, I mean all those other lies(saying I will do thus and thus and I do no such thing is called lying) in the announcement or any other thing that has been totally neglected in the pursuit of yet another unwanted 4* in two weeks. Which is far more catastrophic for sales is too much inventory from last season and waning brand interest in the new incoming designs. see literally every mall brand clothier, every electronics store, the downward spiral of the X-franchises during the late 90’s-00s, any indian lunch buffet, etc. Couple of duds and neglecting your customers needs is not going to grow sales no matter what your selling.

    Why no update to well anything besides some button shading and punctuation correction? Because they have a 2week scrum. There ain’t no time for anything else but the next release. We are in an arms race: who is going to get burnt out first : devs or players. Then the pubs will probably wonder duhhhh what happened ; we had a golden goose, you mean we had to give it sustenance? Squeezing it doesn’t make it lay any faster? 
  • jamesh
    jamesh Posts: 1,600 Chairperson of the Boards

    At the moment, it looks like the devs are trying to determine what the market value of shards are.  Will people pay HP for a rotating stock of small shard bundles in a store page most people don't visit regularly? Will people pay dollars for a larger bundle of shards for multiple characters from the H4H store page? How about spending HP? Will people spend HP on tokens for a vault containing shards?

    Introducing extra variables like changes to the rewards or shards from opening tokens would make it harder to analyse the sales data. If I know that I'm going to receive X shards for a 4* or 5* character every week, then that is going to affect how much I'm willing to pay for extra shards on top of that.

    As far as "shardmas" ruining the developer's plans, I'm not so sure.  Like with supports, it was necessary to give out a decent amount of free shards at launch so users would grow accustomed to the new system.  If players didn't have the personal experience of converting a bunch of shards to covers or champ levels, then they might ignore the subsequent offers. The same might be true if they saw the developers using shards as a way to screw them out of rewards they would otherwise get.

    And it is not as if everyone stopped chasing covers after the one-off windfall from the new champion rewards...

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